


The Measure of a Life

by Zalphon



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls I: Arena, Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 22:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21796213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zalphon/pseuds/Zalphon
Summary: A Dunmer Judge reflects on his life and what the meaning of a life truly is.
Kudos: 1





	The Measure of a Life

The Measure of a Life

By Merano Dalobar, Magistrate-Judge of Falkreath and Survivor of the Red Year

Everybody spends their life in search of answers—of purpose—and most people will never find that purpose, no matter how much their heart longs for it. So they slip into quiet resignation and substitute their own hypothesized purpose for what their actual purpose is or should have been, because a life lived without some semblance of meaning is no life at all, which is why I find myself laughing the bitter laugh of a man who everything, yet nothing, but I do not shed tears, because I have realized the error of my ways and nothing can take that from me. I have lived in a way that most will never and as I sit here knowing the Spider comes for me with her fangs dripping, I feel no fear, for I have finally found my peace after all of these years.

I was but a child when the Red Year came and our lives were ripped apart. I remember hearing my mother cry into the night as my father left in the night to join his Redoran brothers at the Battle of Ald’ruhn. That was the last time I heard my father’s voice and I used to ask myself why? Why did he go when he knew he’d never come back? Why did he abandon us? I hated him. I hated him for so long and I hated him more than I thought I could hate anyone, but as I sit here pondering my own life, I come to understand why he did what he did even though he knew it was suicide. He did it for the reason we all do things: The Pursuit of Purpose. He wasn’t a good fighter by any stretch and in fact, he was Redoran by birth, not by having earned his place within the House, but that did not make him any less willing to lay down his life alongside his brothers as he did in that great battle. I didn’t understand why. I couldn’t. But I do now. His life up until that point had just been his own substitution for what his life should’ve been: a wife, a son—a family. But that’s not what his life was meant for and he knew it. He knew he was meant to be a warrior even though he was perhaps the mediocre warrior I’d ever met and that’s why he did it. He did it because he wasn’t fulfilled—he wasn’t actualized by his life as a husband and father, so he abandoned us to lay down his life to finally make the peace with himself that he never could before.

You see, it doesn’t matter what we try to substitute as our ‘purpose’, because it will never provide us the fulfillment that our truth will and that’s why so many people march to the grave with a weight upon their souls. They denied themselves happiness through their hubris in choosing to abandon their truth for what it is easy. My father for instance, he was meant to be a warrior, to die a warrior’s death long before he met my mother or sired me, but he denied himself that destiny and as a result, he spent his life in a state of anhedonia until he marched into the darkness never to be seen again to fulfill the destiny he knew he should’ve years ago. It was perhaps the only time in my life I saw my father truly feel—anything. He would have quiet moments of satisfaction and pride as I grew, but in each of those moments was a pain that ate at him like a cancer, because in his heart, he knew that his family was a prison to him and that so long as he put them first, he could never truly be free to be the man he was meant to be. But he stayed in his cell for so long until the pain ate through his sense of obligation to us and it was only then that he found the prison he had been stuck in for so long had been unlocked the entire time and that was when he left for the final time.

As I said, I hated him for such a long time. I hated that he abandoned us. I hated that he chose his ‘honor’ over us. I hated everything he was, but now? Now I pity him and I must confess that I myself made the same mistake he did: I denied my destiny just as he did, but just as he did, I finally am free of the prison of my own design. Our prisons were so different, but at the same time, so very alike. We both fell into things we didn’t want, because we didn’t know how to pursue what we truly did want.

He built a family and I built a career and we both hated the things we created, because they were constant reminders of our clipped wings and that we and we alone were responsible for our wings being clipped. It doesn’t matter though, because he eventually flew free and I now await my own freedom. I never really knew what my purpose was until a few weeks prior when I was confronted by a man whose son I had cast judgment and sentenced to the block. He blubbered in my arms about his son and how he had proof of his son’s innocence. And he did indeed give me the proof. His son had indeed been framed and I had signed his death warrant and that was the moment when I realized my purpose, just as my father realized his.

My father was meant to be a warrior and to die a warrior’s death.

I thought I was meant to be an agent of justice, but I realize that in my zeal to do what is righteous, I have warped the very thing I devoted my life to. You see, my father built a family because he couldn’t cope with the fact that he’d never truly be the warrior he always envisioned he should’ve been and as a result, he was a failure both as a father and as a warrior. I devoted myself to the study of Law, because I wanted to see justice—I wanted to see the wicked punished and now I realize that my pursuit of justice has never truly been just—it has been vengeful, it has been cruel, it has been sadistic and now I realize what it was I was meant to be: I was meant to be a better man than I am. I was meant to be kind. To be compassionate. To hold love in my heart. And instead, I have become anything but, and that is why I laugh the laugh I do at myself, because I have failed and for one who has failed as hard as I have, there is no redemption—there is no atonement—but there is still freedom on the horizon. It is not the freedom my father knew, for he walked out of his prison alive, but it is freedom from it all the same. I do not know when, I do not know how, but I do know that I’ve performed the Sacrament and they will come for me as they come for all who are targeted by it and I sit here, laughing my laugh, because I know that soon—I’ll be free.

Finally free.


End file.
